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January 7th, 2012

It’s hard to comment on an episode with literally nothing in it.

Impressions:

Wow, was this boring as all hell. Where’s the hook? Where’s the pirating? Where’s the reason to keep watching? For that matter, where the hell did all the MiB go when a guy wandered in and started shooting at what were ostensibly schoolgirls? This episode was so so painfully slow and so little of the first 20 minutes or so held any real value. If they had started from the maid cafe at the end, I’m not sure if I’d have missed anything important that I didn’t already know from the show’s blurb. You don’t need to kill off 2/3rds of your cast to be a hook, but you’ve got to have something besides people commenting on a ship lazily drifting through space and then dinner with mom. I almost longed for Ararararagi to be screaming at me again. At least that was keeping me awake.

So we have pacing as a major issue from the get go. The production’s not exactly anything to write home either. The music’s not bad, I guess, but everything else is exceptionally mediocre. About the only visually interesting part was just after the interstitial when she had a flashback to what happened during the commercial break. Apparently before going to bed, she ODed on some kind of horrible drug because her flashback was full of blinding white light. Not even the amusing kind of light eminating from the crotches and breasts of Japanese feudal girl warlords either. Just… bright light over more talking. I think the most amusing part otherwise was when she typed "pirate" into her search engine, and this is what comes up. What the hell kind of search engine is that, Ask Jeeves?

So bleh. This episode was tremendously boring and covered practically nothing it promised. No space. No pirates. No bodacity. I’m not even sure I want to know what the Japanese think is ‘bodacious’, but I sure as hell know that this isn’t it.

Eh. I’m pretty sure the type of person who would enjoy this show isn’t going to be turned off by this episode. Being a sci-fi junky I’ll certainly buy it when Sentai releases it, and /m/ seems to like it as well.

Of course I can’t speak for the Japanese and they’re the people who actually matter.

Wow, technology has advanced. Not talking about the spaceships, I mean the image search engine that did not have porn in the first 16 results. The majesty of sufficiently advanced technology…

Also, BOW CHICKA WOW WOW.

I think this any series would be better if some fansubbers replaced all the dialog with 70s movie stereotypes. Maybe redub one of the girls voices with the deepest voice we can find. In fact, I would write for that.
“You’ll have to land in that field — what does the altimeter say?”
“Ah’m at elevation FUNK!” (music starts)

My impression of what the MiBs did in the cafe at the end of the episode is that everybody opened up on everybody else once the first shot was fired.

(The show didn’t exactly make this clear, since it didn’t animate much of that. But we saw several different guns firing, none of them the first man’s little pocket gun, and then we saw the protagonist crouched on the floor while gunfire went back and forth.)

I didn’t think it was great, but it was OK. Nice and normal before the poor girl’s life get’s upended.

Then again, I remember when even action movies had slow spots to let you catch your breath. Kids these days… I swear, if it isn’t blowing up, burning down, or falling off a cliff and then blowing up while it burns down, it’s just too boring for them to watch.

Bodacious Space Pirates feels a bit like Hyouge Mono later on (episode 5, with all its dialogue). The problem is, Hyouge Mono is an awesome, realistic show about old men, whereas Bodacious Space Pirates is a generic, fantasy show about young women. Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be between it and Horizon; both have a myriad of characters nobody cares about; both have indiscriminate dialogue fired all around the place; and both are of, uh, dubious quality.

Eh. Other than pacing and Marika’s character I don’t find many actual issues with it, though.